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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

I Shall Wear Purple*

Hey, take a look at what's done! (I'm not modeling it because it's still a little damp.)

I had hoped to get this done over the weekend, but I spent Sunday afternoon washing the last four loads of my Rambouillet fleece (had to get it done before work started on our basement project yesterday morning) and cooking two dinners. That meant I spent a lot of time running up and down the stairs and puttering in the kitchen and not so much time sitting with my sweater. Rainbow then proceeded to have a major meltdown at bedtime, so that meant I lost about half an hour of knitting time in the evening. Fortunately, there wasn't a whole lot left to be done. Last night I knit the last four rows of the collar, wove in all the ends, and sewed on the toggles. It got tossed into the bathtub for a soak and then laid out to dry just before I went to bed.

Pattern:Chandail by Triona MurphyYarn: Madelinetosh Tosh Vintage (100% superwash merino) in Iris, just shy of 6 skeinsNeedles: US 7 (4.5 mm) Chiao Goo circsStarted/Completed: February 2/February 25Mods: I offset the ribbing just a bit on the body so that the beginning and end of the row would look the same

I'm still a bit amazed at how quickly I finished this sweater, especially considering that (a) I didn't knit on it every day in the past three weeks (I took a couple of nights off for spinning) and (b) the Mister was gone for part of two weeks, meaning my knitting time at night was considerably shorter than usual. But I suppose when you're knitting a great pattern at a relatively large gauge with fabulous yarn, it does go by quickly!

This is now the second of Triona's patterns that I've knit, and like the last one, it's knit seamlessly from the bottom up -- the body's knit flat, the sleeves are knit in the round, and then they're all joined on the needle to work the yoke. The cable pattern required just a bit of concentration (insofar as I had to count my rows/rounds every now and then), but I didn't need to refer to the pattern for the cables once I'd worked the first cabled row. This is definitely one of those patterns that looks a lot more complex than it is -- the cable is just two rope cables worked side by side. That meant that with the exception of some occasional counting or measuring, this sweater required very little attention, so I could just sit down and knit.

I'm really very pleased with how this turned out, and it was truly a pleasure to knit. Tosh Vintage is so lovely to knit with -- it really has a lot of life to it, and I must admit that I started swatching with something else while the sweater was in the bath that felt truly dead and limp in comparison. As I said in the Madelinetosh Lovers knitalong thread, I think if I could knit with nothing else but Vintage for the rest of my life, I'd be perfectly content!

*I don't consider myself an "old woman" yet, but the title comes from this poem.